Do Birth Control Pills Cause Hair Loss?
Noticing more hair fall than usual can be an extremely stressful experience. Not knowing what’s causing it, makes it even more stressful.
Getting to the root of the problem is daunting, time consuming and it can take a while to figure out what's causing your excessive hair fall. Well, that’s what happened to me. It took me a year to realise that birth control pills, were causing my hair to fall out!
After doing some research, I found that it is actually very common for women to experience hair loss when taking birth control pills, however not a lot people are aware of it. Some women are really sensitive to the pill hormones which can lead to hair loss. Hair will move from the growing phase to the resting phase way too quickly, so you'll end up losing more hair than usual.
Hair Fall - How much hair do we lose every day? What's normal?
Losing between 100 to 125 hair strands per day is considered normal. However, this is only a guideline and you shouldn't compare your daily hair fall to anyone else's hair fall - everyone is different.
For example: when I am not experiencing hair loss, I barely notice any hair falling out. If I had to put a number to it, I would say less than 20 hair strands per day! However when I was taking birth control pills, my daily hair fall exceeded 100 per day and this was too high for me and it made my hair parting look a lot more noticeable.
My journey to finding out what was causing my hair loss
I had to do something about it. I decided to splash some cash on some of the best hair vitamins out there. I took Viviscal tablets for months and months and whilst I saw improvement to the health of the hair, the consistent hair fall seemed to persist. I realised that the only new thing that I introduced in my life, that past year was the pill.
I spoke with my doctor and I told her that my hair is falling out because of the pill. She said that birth control pills don’t usually cause hair loss, but I was convinced that the problem was the contraceptive pill. She put me on a different type of pill, so I decided to try that for a few months, but the problem persisted.
After some time of testing different birth control pills and still stressing out about the amount of hair I was losing every day, I decided to end all of these different contraceptive pills that I was taking and I bought the natural cycles thermometer. Oh, what a relief.
Natural Cycles - Hormone Free Contraception
Picture Credit: Natural Cycles
Instead of taking my daily birth control pills, I decided to start using the thermometer by Natural Cycles. The contraceptive thermometer works alongside a mobile app. You take your temperature first thing in the morning before you get out of bed. You then take a note of the reading on the temperature and insert it onto the Natural Cycles mobile app. Within a few seconds, the app will tell you whether:
You are fertile or not
Whether your period is on its way
Whether you are ovulating
I gained my life and confidence back and most importantly my hair stopped falling out after a couple of weeks or so of stopping the birth control pill.
Why is your hair falling out?
If you've been experiencing hair loss for a while and you would like to find out what's causing it, I would encourage you to visit a Thricologist, as they are amazing at diagnosing the reason behind the excessive hair fall. They may also send you for a blood test to check whether you are a deficient in certain nutrients.
Seeing a scalp specialist can really help you get to the root of the problem as well as having the support you need to help you gain your confidence back that you might have lost along the way.
I've created a FREE hair loss checklist for you that you can download today. There are so many different causes to hair loss, and it's important to go through each one to figure out what's causing your hair shedding.
Use this checklist as a guideline and if in doubt, always seek advice from a professional. You can reach out to your doctor for medical advice or fix an appointment with a Thricologist. Hair loss can be a sign of something more serious going on in the body (such as thyroid issues). Do not ignore it.
Don't forget to download the free checklist:
